Everything is imploding

For the Hollywood blockbuster the implosion has many advantages over the explosion. The first and most obvious attraction is novelty. The implosion takes the rather well-worn Hollywood explosion and turns it inside-out—with none of those pesky balls of fire covering up the destruction. Explosions are fairly passé at this point, even boring: The filmmaker most closely associated with them is Michael Bay, who, according to one movie demolition expert, has included steadily more explosions in each movie he’s made (up through Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which reportedly contained a mind-numbing 283 explosions).

But it’s not just Hollywood. Haven’t you noticed how no one speaks, metaphorically, about anything exploding anymore? No sir. To be trend you have to say it’s imploding. Much cooler.

You know what’s much cooler than turning over in one’s grave? Spinning in one’s grave. That one’s so cool that nobody says “turn over in his grave” anymore.

9 Responses

Would you accept the gradual shift from mild expletives (“drat, darn, gosh”) to bluer and less printable ones (“fugh, mofo”) as cliche creep? Or is that merely the result of the gradual erosion of social norms?

First off, in today’s world, explosions are both commonplace in the news and politically incorrect in speech. Explosions are something unpleasant that real people die in. Twenty years ago, we were far less likely to know anyone who had died in an explosion, so there was an acceptable fascination about them in our entertainment. Tweeting “implosion” while you’re at the airport probably won’t result in the same security sweep that “explosion” will get you.

As for the cliche creep idea, that’s just the continuation of the dumbing down of our language. No one cares that “The proof is in the pudding,” is an incorrect version of “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and we are much more likely to hear “I could care less,” rather than with that pesky additional syllable that actually conveys the intended meaning. Don’t even get me started on “decimate”!

The word cliche is another good example as it is often used when people mean idiom.